The world in 2015: A nostalgia for balance
December 23, 2015 FYODOR LUKYANOV, SPECIAL TO RBTH

Lykanov! Always an interesting read. To his, I would add several thoughts.

What are coming undone are the understandings of Westphalia, and the UN provides most of the evidence. The global political dynamic today is centrifugal not unitary. Regime change nonsense just aggravates the spin. The number of nation states has exploded exponentially since WWII. We can layer treaty condominiums upon each other and it changes little. The UN, as an example, is the world’s most expensive debating club.

If international feather merchants were the answer, we would all be in paradise by now.

The internet and related science may be global, but communitarian sentiments like democracy are not. The great problems of the future are moral, not scientific. Here ethical recidivism gets expensive. Just ask Beslan, Paris, or San Bernardino.

Indeed, if facts or evidence matters, the Internet may be part of the instability problem, not a solution,

Any minimalist argument atomizes the Islamist phenomenon. The threat isn’t ISIS any more than it was al Qaeda. Islamism writ large is the growing global problem. Until sovereign states admit that to themselves, Islam continues to metastasize at our peril. I think Vladimir Putin understands this. Few others in the West do.

If there are two cultural communities; it’s the West (which includes Russia) and the rest. China is still a bit of a cipher. As with Islamism, none of us has a clue about where a capital communist polity goes in the future. Command communal capitalism is still a new kid on the block.

Islam, however, has been with us for 14 centuries. That golem has always been hiding in plain sight

Sam Huntington was correct and my old pal Frank Fukuyama was not. The “clash” we witness is not the end so much as the beginning of the end. History is a two way street. Apologies to Hegel. We can indeed go back to the future as well as forward. Religious “nostalgia,” incidentally, is what makes ISIS, ISIL, Daesh, and the Islamic State possible.

If you cannot appreciate the “wisdom of crowds,” you will never understand American democracy or the Trump phenomenon. Trial by fire builds character – and constituencies.

The other day a headline read; “Donald Trump declares war on Muslims.” After reading the subtext, you could have concluded that the real war might be with biased journalists andlunatic Muslims, in that order.

That same day, George Stephanopoulos tried to link the Republican pole sitter to Hitler over Mr. Trump’s latest blast at immigration policy. The raps against “the Donald” usually test the limits of credulity and fact, to say nothing of fairness. You may recall, ironically, that appeals to “fairness” are a favorite media mantra when it comes to convicts, drunks, junkies, deadbeats, dependents, immigrants, and Islamists. Pardon any redundancies.

Any push back against the conventional wisdom and Islam is vilified as a “far right” politics. You rarely hear “far left,” the invisible elephant, in any context these days.

Fair play is seldom an issue when it comes to success, achievement, or men like Trump and Ben Carson, or any political newcomer who challenges media spin or contemporary narratives of polite mendacity.

Anon, expect the next Islamic atrocity in America to be blamed on Donald Trump’s rhetoric. Were it not for guys like Trump, the argument will go, Daniel Pearl would still be filing copy.

The press might bowdlerize facts and truth, but eventually the crowd knows better. Lincoln put it best: “You can’t fool all of the people all the time.”

Unlike Lincoln, journalists hail today mainly from the political Left. No surprises there. Indeed since WWII, urban print and broadcast monopolies are a kind of permanent political condominium, a Democrat Party monoculture if you will. While Republicans spin out into industry, the Democrat revolving door tends to feed the media. Tim Russert, Nina Totenberg, George Stephanopoulos, Cokie Roberts, Chuck Todd, James Carville, and Chris Matthews are prominent examples. Parsing the press is fraught with redundancy too, yet two broad categories are evident: bimbos and mimbos.

A bimbo journalist might be any woman who lionizes political men at the expense of real men with real jobs. Or put another way, a bimbo will always confuse election with achievement. Given a choice, a media floozy will swoon for a glib Chicago toker with a law degree long before she warms to an accomplished neurosurgeon from Detroit or a shrill developer from Queens. “Mary Jane” and marijuana are joined by more than metaphor.

A fairly typical piece of bimbo copy is found in the aforementioned article by Dara Lind which claims that Trump is at “war with Islam.” Previously, you may recall, Trump had been at war with women. This is the same press loath to use words like war, Muslim, or fascism when the subjects are political terror and Islam. Hyperbole, apparently, is fair play for partisan politics, yet haram for public safety or national security issues like religious warfare.

Dara should be careful about her wish list. A jihadist is the kind of boy that treats girls like Ms. Lind as sword bait, chattel, or livestock. Ms. Lind needs the counsel of an adult journalist, say Lara Logan, for some perspective.

Lind writes for VOX, a spin-off founded by WashingtonPost veterans. The stated goal of VOX is to provide more content than the Post. “Content,” when the subject is Trump, is better read as political hatchet work.

The cohort on the “mimbo” side of the media spectrum is more numerous, a target rich environment. Chris Matthews (NBC) and George Stephanopoulos (ABC) are examples.

Matthews stands out, because he, more than any partisan troll, set the tone for the Obama era. If there were any justice, Chris Mathews would get a Pulitzer Prize for pandering. Recall that he proclaimed on nationwide television that the election of a black male made “a thrill run up his leg.”

Set aside the homoerotic day dreaming, and consider only the celebration of melanin as achievement, a standard now underlined by a Noble Prize.

Martin Luther King is spinning in his grave.

With one spontaneous rhetorical orgasm, Matthews established the bigotry of low expectations as a political metric. Indeed, in seven years, Barack Hussein Obama has lived down to the Matthews marker.

Trump says that the Obama era does not bode well for the future of black politicians on the left. The Democrat slate for 2016 is in fact all white bread. The Republican offering, in contrast, is a coalition of color; a woman, an African American, two Hispanics, and a flash mob of pink/white guys. Lincoln would be proud.

Matthews may be confused or bigoted, but George Stephanopoulos is prey to abject historical stupidity. In the halcyon days of White House bimbo eruptions, George carried water for misogyny and perjury as a Clinton apologist. To be fair, loyalty is a cardinal virtue in journalism and politics alike.

Still, likening a developer from Queens to Hitler, is a little like comparing a half-baked apple to the apocalypse. Clearly, Stephanopoulos did not major in history at Columbia. Here’s what he missed.

The differences between National Socialism and toxic Islamism are two. True believers or sympathizers with jihad number in the hundreds of millions, the Nazi cohort of true believers was relatively small. And German fascism was based on a creed of racial superiority while Islamists are hostage to illusions of religious superiority. Both have fascism in common where dystopian violence, terror, and occupation are the primary agents of influence, colonialism, or imperial conquest.

When Islamists speak of “crusades,” they are in fact projecting the hope and tradition of ancient Mohammedan dreams. Muslims ravished (630-1094 AD) the great cities of the Greco/Roman Mediterranean basin, much as they do today, for hundreds of years before Pope Urban II (1042-99 AD) unleashed the Franks towards Jerusalem. With the exception of Iberia, western civilization never recovered most of what was lost to Islam and irredentism.

Judaism and Christianity enriched the Greco/Roman world with ideas. Islam, then as now, seeks to restrain ideas at the point of a sword, through the “martyrdom” of suicide bombers, or an iconoclasm born of rigid, rote, and primal theology.

The original crusades, like modern Islamist imperialism, were about Muslim aggression and belated European defense. Islam is again on the march today and modern Europe has not the wit, nor the heart, this time to mount an ideological or kinetic defense.

The difference between then and now is that Khalif Baghdadi has already bypassed the gates of Vienna. More than a camel’s nose now stalks the remnants of Jewish, Greek, Roman, and Christian cultures. Yes, George, what little is left of your Greek patrimony is at risk too.

Nothing in Trump’s vitae has anything to do with ancient or modern Muslim religious necrosis – or Hitler’s historic secular depredations.

Contra factual bleating which passes for truth or analysis at ABC, one that attacks those who urge the containment of fascism, is the kind of double think that makes genocide possible. Posturing for ratings at ABC, with spin that equates the plight of Jews with Muslims, is consistent with the polite domestic bigotry and racism of Chris Mathews at NBC.

The walk of media shame has inducted Wallace, Rather, Totenberg, and Williams. Matthews and Stephanopoulos cannot be far behind. Trump’s war with mendacity in America and abroad is a tale of numbers. When the issue is “trust,” American journalism wallows in the single digits in many polls. Trump’s numbers are approaching fifty percent in many places where votes matter.

Elitists try to diminish Trump’s numbers with innuendo about “high school graduates” as if a college degree ever made a difference in intelligence, character, or achievement, especially among politicians or journalists.

The more media and the establishment attack Trump, the more relevant he becomes. A strategy of confronting press and political spinners is paying HUGE dividends, if we can poach Trump’s favorite adjective.

Who knows where Donald Trump’s campaign goes? He continues to confound supporters and critics alike. Win or lose, Trump brings many subjects that we prefer to ignore into sharp focus. On every hot button topic from obese women, to soft racism, to John McCain, to press bias, to immigration, on to toxic Islam; Trump is as close to truth on issues as his critics are to pandering.

Seven years of bombs, bull shite, and Obama dithering in Libya, Yemen, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria have killed more Arabs and Muslims than ISIS. You will never see those statistics above the fold.

Trump has bloodied the waters of American politics too. When the feeding frenzy is done, the worst shills may have consumed each other and some truth about safety and national security might still float.

For the moment, the usual suspects; media, career politicians, and associated nitwits can’t imagine Donald Trump as president. Compared to whom? Surely not Barack Hussein Obama, another Bush, or Bill Clinton’s most durable gal pal.

Posit, if you will, a series of Donald/Hillary debates. The gate on those cage matches could pay off the national debt. The winner might still have enough of a surplus to renovate 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for the Trump tribe.

The wisdom of crowds is the way democracy must work when media and political elites collude to fool all of the people all the time.

We could begin with: “ISIS comes to America.” But that would suggest that the latest mutant strain of Muslim terror is somehow new or unique. The sad truth is, alas, that contemporary imperial Islam, a kind of cultural sewage, has been flowing just beneath the veneer of civilization for decades now. You might think of the San Bernardino massacre as merely another one of those urban pipes that bursts from time to time and becomes a public nuisance. Blood and gore in the name of religion is now routine by repetition.

Those who work inside the Beltway rationalize lethal religious mayhem as workplace violence, “junior varsity” pranks, or better still, an opportunity cost of gun sales. Gun control is to terrorism now as public schools are to education. Nonetheless, taxpaying hermaphrodites and voting masochists can rest easy. The Islamic State is “contained” we are assured. There are no “credible” ISIS threats to America or Americans.

Clearly, religious executions today have political utility. Slaughter in God’s name is a terrible thing to waste. For potential victims, when you see something, please say something. Call a cop and see what stops. After all, in a “long game,” only soothing rhetoric really matters.

Say something useful too, like HELP – OMG or WTF! Then throw your panties, or your smart phone, at the hirsute dude with the AK-47 or the burka bimbo with the bomb. If your phone doesn’t kill or pacify those “nefarious characters,” hit your knees, face Mecca, tuck you head between your knees, and kiss your timid ass goodbye. After all, we will always have Paris and 9/11 and the kind of “hope and change” that is beginning to look like a train ride to the ovens.

Alas, religious affiliations of victims and perps alike are irrelevant yet again! Not just Jews, Christians, Copts, or Yazidi this time. The target in San Bernardino was a government sanctioned secular humanist Christmas bash, an infidel cum apostate California bulls eye laden with symbolism, indeed a threefer: Jerry Brown, baby Jesus, and alcohol. The latest Islamic free-fire zone is more evidence of the need to restrain infidel excess and the need for new mandates to control speech, partying, guns, Santa Claus, and “islamophobic” Christmas.

Holiday eggnog, after all, is one of those gateway drugs that provokes Muslims and inspires genocidal rage.

Alas, the sharia and jihad ambitions of Islam in America might be too modest. Muslims merely want to return to the 7th Century and Mohammed. To stay in that race to the past, agnostic America might give Stonehenge and sun worship another whirl. Say “salve solstice,” not merry “you know what” this year.

The latest Muslim assault on the 21st Century has put “Berdoo” in the Quintin Tarantino hall of shame too. Until jihad came to town, San Berdoo, we should note, was known best on the left coast for biker bars and awesome weed.

The 4 December bloodbath in California is both sequel and prequel of dystopian Christmases to come. Take that FBI news conference two days after as evidence, a kind of costumed, choreographed public relations porn flic.

PR is now the first federal line of defense against shooters, bombers, terrorists, and religious fascists. Yes, here again soothing, albeit empty, words are best. San Bernardino was no exception.

One jihadist was a native, the other was an import via Saudi Arabia. Not that any of that mattered to clueless centurions. Both shooters were Muslim and both had roots in Pakistan. Doesn’t matter! Both were equipped like Kevlar ninjas. Doesn’t matter either! The ISIS wannabes wasted a Christmas party. Group kill is not that relevant either in traditional Hollywood oeuvre! The FBI and a constellation of “four star” cops could not, or would not, say anything specific about the obvious: race, religion, arms, ideology, motives, or affiliations.

If you are a government flake and you know something these days, your job is to say nothing. You know the drill. Muslim feelings trump public safety, national security, and all vestiges of common decency – or uncommon sense. In contrast, everyman on the street is enjoined to see and say something. Yes, but good grief not about immigrants, terrorists, Muslims, or Islam.

Word of Donald!

The best parts of the masque in Berdoo were those stars. No fewer than eight, yes eight, blue groupies in the FBI entourage wore four stars on their lapels. Who knew that a city of less than 250K had so many four star lawmen keeping us safe? How, you might ask, did Wyatt Earp ever tame Tombstone with just one star and a scatter gun?

Four star cops in urban America are similar to all those fruit salad generals at the Pentagon, impotent mannequins, hangar queens grounded by political correctness. Uniform garnish matters more than results in public safety/national security sinecures these days. Policing and soldiering in America is starting to look a lot like ghost of Orwell’s future – or scoreless soccer and kindergarten T-ball.

The obligatory press conference that quickly follows any gory Muslim rampage in America is now a kind of civic cult ritual.

To start, American Islamist front groups (CAIR for example) launch the spin, while a day or two later the FBI and a local chorus sugar coats the infidel dead, apostate lame, and agnostic maimed. These televised spin cycles are usually orchestrated by the Feds, echoed by the national press, and back lit by a host of mute locals that might include zaftig crossing guards with stars on their epaulets. The elected Commander-in-Chief usually leads from behind, keeping his peace until moral equivalence, mental health, gun control, melting icebergs, or carbon credits can be worked into the post mortems.

Why it is, by the way, that Bernie Sanders still doesn’t have a Cabinet post? Surely, the Islamic State could be brought to heel by carbon credits or an NSA all-access peeping pass.

After seven years, team Obama still doesn’t get it. If ISIS implodes tomorrow, Islamism, like the Big Lebowski, still abides.

The Islamic State, a big slice of the Ummah similar to Boko Haram and al Qaeda, is a new symptom, not a new disease. The civic cancer is, and always has been, the rapidly metastasizing global ideology of sharia and jihad, in short, religious fascism. Like National Socialism, it’s the ideology, stupid! The predicate of all fascism is coercion, indeed the kind of sick terror now playing in a domicile near you, places like Paris, Mali, and San Bernardino.

American tactics and strategy may appear feckless, but the Clinton, Bush, and Obama regimes are united by the belief that Muslim reputation is more important than American lives. Both major political parties in the US are aping European quislings for fear that things might get worse. The public too are patronized with fears of fear; indeed admonished to expect and accept both immigrants and serial depredations indefinitely.

All the while, the Oval Office is mocked by a religion it dares not name. John Kerry is characterized as an “uncircumcised geezer,” an ambiguous slur that surely assumes too much about men who work at Foggy Bottom. By some bizarre mutation of values; the White House, ayatollahs, mullahs, imams, and assassins all have similar goals – a passive if not submissive America.

Al Baghdadi is also annoyed that Obama trivializes ISIS, aka the Islamic State, as Daesh or ISIL. According to a poorly sourced MOSAD report, the Caliph is considering rebranding ISIS, or jihad, as “Global Warming” in order to get better ink at the NewYork Times. Islam and Armageddon seldom appear above the fold these days.

Beltway apologists respond in kind by claiming that the answer to ISIS, like warm weather, is in “the long game.” You could read such bravado as an endorsement of the status quo, kick-the-can, surrender, or all three. The long game strategy is a comfort much like knowing that in the end we are all dead anyway. Team Obama’s most cherished ambition now seems to be to limp out of Dodge ahead of the apocalypse.

When we see something, we should say something! Say something like, “What were Americans thinking when they put Steve Quincy Urkel in charge of the world’s most confused democracy?”

On 25 November a Lockheed Martin F-16 fighter, allegedly flown by NATO Turkish pilots, shot down a Russian Sukhoi bomber over Syria. The Turks claimed that the SU-24 violated their airspace, apparently by a few kilometers – or seconds in flight time at most. The Turks claimed to have issued 10 warnings during an overflight which, if it occurred at all, could only have been brief. There’s no evidence that the Turk pilots were on Guard, or any radio frequency that would have allowed the Russians to hear warnings.

NATO and DOD had previously refused to collaborate with Moscow to deconflict air operations against Syrian jihadi and mujahedeen. Turk and American governments quickly claimed that Turkey has a right to defend its airspace, yet neither Washington nor Ankara could say from what. How Russian airstrikes in Syria threaten Turkey is not really much of a mystery. Russians were known to be bombing terrorist oil targets south of the Turk border – too effectively it seems.

The distance from Incirlick Air Base to Atakya is about 72 miles. That Turkish flight of US manufactured F-16s was very likely under USAF positive air control, airborne or ground based. And the idea that the Turks or Americans at Incirlik AB can’t identify an airborne SU-24 is equally ludicrous. This incident was pre-planned at worst or coordinated in the air at best. (Hat tip to Putin’s and Lavrov’s analysis.) DOD may not be able separate Muslim moderate from Islamic terrorist on the ground, but aircraft recognition or ID should be a no-brainer even for Air Force “professionals.”

The summary execution of a Russian pilot in his chute is testimony to the caliber and cowardice of US allies like Turkey and so-called Turkomen “moderate” rebels.

The NATO shoot down was one of two things, an unfortunate accident or a shot across Russia’s bow, indeed, a dangerous provocation. The evidence supports the latter. After all, the Russians are in Syria by invitation, the US and Turkey are not. Vladimir Putin characterized the incident as a “stab in the back” committed by “accomplices of terrorists.” The Russian president may be correct this time, on both counts.

Perfidy is the most likely explanation of the SU-24 incident, but incompetence might still be in the running. Ash Carter and his merry band of flaccid flags at the Pentagon are not having a winning season. A USAF AC-130 gunship in Afghanistan mistook a hospital for a Taliban headquarters recently. The operational incompetence that oft characterizes the fight in South Asia could be having echoes at joint base Incirlik.

When the American president says the Russians are bombing anti-Assad “moderates,” he fails to say that these groups are also the same arms merchants, human traffickers, and oil smugglers that finance the Islamic State. Indeed southern Turkey is a haven for Sunni terrorist training, arms depots, sanctuaries, and smuggled oil. Perfidious Turks are flushing Muslim immigrants West to Europe and flushing jihadi, arms, and oil dollars south to those “nefarious characters” in Syria and Iraq.

The truth about northern Syria today is that it is a multinational pig sty of Muslim opportunists most of whom will sell their gun to the highest bidder. In this neighborhood, Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov is correct again, “a terrorist is a terrorist.”

Northern Syria is where American desk bound dolts like John McCain and Hillary Clinton would like to establish a “no-fly” zone.

In effect, clueless politicians of two stripes are asking USAF to fly cover for every known Islamist vice including the financing of fascist ISIS. Both the Islamic State and Ankara hypocrites are benefiting from the black market oil bazaar now flourishing between Syria and Turkey. Murky oil trafficking by Turks is now on a par with the opium trade in Afghanistan, corrosive obscenities that team Kerry/Obama chose to ignore – or protect.

Ex-deputy chief of CIA, Michael Morell claims that USAF doesn’t bomb the Turkish/ISIS oil cartel because of Obama administration environmental angst. Morell, you may recall, was the Intelligence sycophant who fashioned the Benghazi cover up with Hillary Clinton’s State Department. Morell, now spinning news at CBS, is a walking, talking symptom of the Peter Principle at work in CIA in particular and the Intelligence Community writ large.

Note that the US led air campaign heretofore had not struck the ISIS oil racket or those northbound oil tankers before the Russian Air Force arrived in Syria. The shoot down of Ivan’s SU-24 was probably a not too subtle warning – or just a spasm of Erdogan/Obama pique.

The two most effective fighting forces in Syria are ISIS and the Kurds. Turkey fears that a Kurdish led victory over ISIS in Syria and Iraq will underwrite the legitimacy of Kurdistan. Alas, Turkey and ISIS interests on the ground are joined by perfidy.

Those Russian airstrikes expose the worst kept secret in Mesopotamia. As with Turkish air strikes against the Kurds, team Obama is content to ignore the ISIS/Ankara axis. Indeed, these days, Turkey is a NATO ally in the same sense that AIDS is the antidote to pneumonia.

By ignoring the Turkish Trojan horse, Washington and Brussels have traded NATO integrity, and an immigrant invasion, for base rights in a neo-Ottoman bordello. If the goal is to defeat ISIS or Islamism, Russia would make a more reliable wartime ally in NATO today than Turkey.

The only question left about the ongoing Brussels/Ankara unholy liaison is who is buggering whom?